Francis P Sempa in the Asian Review of Books: Tokyo-based American author Ronald Drabkin has written a riveting, fast-paced account of a Beverly Hills-based spy who engaged in intelligence collection for Japan and provided the Japanese Navy with naval aviation technical expertise before Japan’s attack on American ships, planes and forces at Pearl Harbor. Frederick Rutland was a British naval hero in the First World War, worked for the Japanese Navy in the years between the wars, and had connections to American intelligence agencies in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor. Months before the attack at Pearl Harbor, Rutland offered his services to the United States and Britain when he sensed that a surprise Japanese attack was in the offing. After Pearl Harbor was attacked, Rutland was interned in a British prison and later on the remote Isle of Man as an enemy spy. A few years after the war, then living in Wales, Rutland either committed suicide or was murdered; Drabkin isn’t sure which.
Drabkin’s interest in Rutland and the efforts of American and British counter-espionage agents to uncover enemy spies before and during World War II stemmed initially from bits and pieces of information he learned about his father’s and grandfather’s work in counterintelligence in the Los Angeles area before, during, and after the war. Drabkin’s father and family friends who had also worked for US intelligence shared stories that piqued his interest. He was later able to access declassified FBI and MI5 files on Rutland, as well as useful books and documents from Japanese sources. The FBI, Britain’s MI5, and America’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), Drabkin writes, had botched opportunities to use Rutland against Japan, and later did what they could to cover-up their errors. Drabkin even speculates that one or more of those intelligence services murdered him after the war as part of a cover-up.
Rutland was a World War I British naval pilot who flew “wood-and-canvas” biplanes that were launched not from the decks of warships, but rather lowered by crane into the water from where they took flight. He is credited with designing important improvements to the planes’ electronics and tactics, and his heroic acts during the Battle of Jutland earned him the Distinguished Service Cross and the Albert Medal, First Class. Rutland, writes Drabkin, “became a symbol of both British heroism and technological supremacy.” He subsequently helped to pioneer flat-deck aircraft carriers.
After a messy “wife-swapping” matter with a fellow officer, Rutland—now in his 30s—was deemed too old and of insufficient social class for higher rank. So in the early 1920s, Rutland began working secretly for the Japanese Navy under the guise of working for Mitsubishi. He visited Japan and began to provide the Japanese with information about British naval aviation technology. He became friendly with some rising stars of Japan’s Navy, including then-Captain Isoroku Yamamoto, who would later as Admiral Yamamoto plan the Pearl Harbor attack. This activity brought Rutland to the attention of British naval intelligence and MI5.
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